In Malda, lives are repeatedly devastated by the Ganga. But the bhangon is too mundane to be called a national disaster.

In Agunpakhi, a recent novel by Hasan Azizul Haq, there is a chilling description of the sound of a raging river washing away chunks of dry land. It is not like the slow rumbling of thunder, the shrill whistling of a sharp wind or the fearful shudder of an earthquake. The sound of the river rises and falls, comes close and moves away, resonates from the deeps of the earth and sometimes seems to pour down from the skies. Listening to it, a man can lose his mind.

In Panchanandapur, a village in Malda in West Bengal, the river flows soundlessly. I stood close to it, near the bank where the water lapped against the boulders and sandbags, and tried to imagine what the sound of the bhangon or river erosion was like. All I heard, instead, was a quiet rippling, the steady sound of boats bobbing up and down with the tide, and the fading cry of a kite. “Apni kalpana korte paren na, i nodi kirokom [You cannot imagine what this river can become].” These were the first words uttered by Mofissul Sheikh, who sat smoking under a straw-thatched shelter by the river. Mofissul has lost his fertile plot and his house to the river. Tasleem, young and angry, sat near Mofissul but talked less. The river is a witch, was all he said.

It is not difficult to be bewitched by the river and its beauty. The waters sparkled in the sun, changing colour often — brown, grey and then silver near the Rajmahal hills in the distance. Yet, even as I spoke to the men, they assured me that invisible currents were at work below the surface, weakening the soil, causing the land to sink, inch by inch. “Ui hothay moder bari chhelo, mandir chhelo, gram chhelo [Our houses, temple and village lay out there].” I looked at where Mofissul pointed, but could see nothing except the sand-dunes of a char in the middle of the vast waters. Someone had lit a fire on the char, and the smoke rose in thick gusts. Nayabazaar, Ganga Bhavan (one of Barkat Gani Khan Chowdhury’s favourite haunts), and the bridge over the adjoining Pagla river were now all gone.

l and Tasleem have survived the advancing river and there are almost ten or twelve thousand like them in Panchanandapur. The two men catch fish in these waters. Some of their friends have migrated to the cities as contract labourers. The government has rehabilitated some refugees on land owned by the public works department. Those who have received no compensation have bought their own land. But land and money are in short supply, and it is getting difficult to house the growing number of homeless people. Compensation hardly ever comes as money or houses, but is generally doled out in the form of tarpaulin sheets, boulders, spires and sandbags that get washed away in the rain and in the current. This year, however, river erosion has decreased appreciably in Panchanandapur. Some repair work has been done, but Mofissul is not sure whether the banks would hold till the next rainy season. “Nodir morji hole abar katbe [The river will cut away land again if it feels like],” he said.

I asked Tasleem whether he finds the river beautiful. He answered that he had no time for poetry and told me to visit Manikchak to see the witch at work. Before I left, I asked the children bathing in the river whether I could take a picture (bottom right). They readily obliged, whooping and splashing about in delight. Their relationship with the river was still uncomplicated, I realized. But I knew that all this would change, just like the river’s turbulent course. On my way back to the waiting car, I was stopped by a child with a nearly toothless grin. He asked me to take a picture as he pretended to be a ghost, but a grinning Mofissul shooed him away.

I travelled to Manikchak with Mukim, his wife Anjuara Begum, and Swapanbabu, who drove our groaning car and had hunted birds on the char when he was a boy. Mukim, now a teacher, had also spent his early life near the river. On our way, he described the bhangon in a clear, low voice. When the erosion starts, the water changes colour to a muddy brown, a terrible wind rises, and the small fish swim up to the surface. Mukim remembered the sleepless nights spent listening to the dull roar of the river. But he also told me that he couldn’t forget the afternoons spent fishing on the bodo and chhoto nodi (the Ganga and the Pagla), with funnels made of bamboo, or the evenings spent reading on the ghat.

I watched Mukim and his wife talk: they discussed the soaring price of fruits this Ramazan, poked fun at each other, and argued over the route. This human exchange — the affectionate small talk of a couple in a lyrical, local dialect — was a strange relief after the stories of devastation I had been listening to. When we reached Domhat, in Manikchak’s Madantala, Mukim and I came across an animated crowd by the river. As we drew close, Mukim asked me to take a look at the water: the current was stronger here, and I saw grey waves lashing against the bank. “Nodir bhangon,” whispered Mukim, and I sensed that he was tense.

Some people to our left were breaking a house down (picture, top right). The bricks were being arranged in a neat pile, and a woman was supervising the work. Amala Rabi Das was bringing down her own house, built a year ago. Caught between a hungry river and an uncaring land, she had little choice. Das used to live in Barua Math, a bustling area that is now under water. She set up a new home, a few miles south of Domhat, but the waters caught up with her. This rainy season, the river had crept up to her door, so she was preparing to leave. This time though, she has no place to turn to. Most of the available PWD land had been occupied by other settlers, and Das was too poor to pay the contractors to help her find work in the city. (The going rate for such contract labour, Mukim told me later, was about Rs 5,000 per person.) She didn’t even have the money to take the boat to Jharkhand, where she could find work as a farmhand. Her son migrated last year, and she now lives on the meagre sum that he sends occasionally. As a part of the 100-day work programme under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, she has been issued a job card, but the panchayat has told her that there was no work available. So she waits, for her son or the river, whoever arrives first to take her away.

People slowly gathered around Das, men and women with their own stories. Hriday Mondal has been homeless for years; Saroda Debi lost her sprawling mango orchard a couple of weeks ago; in nearby Sonapur, Ramesh Mondal had poisoned himself. The river has effaced boundaries, both real and imagined, leaving the rich and the poor, men and women, the young and the old, stranded in an endless moment of despair. Understandably, indifference has bred cynicism and rage. Local politicians, they said, come to them once in every five years. Two young women asked me, in a mocking tone, whether I was one of them and wondered why I had come to talk to a forgotten people. For the people of Domhat, the lines separating the government, bureaucracy, aid-agencies and the media have merged in a fearful blur of apathy and neglect. Das asked me to take note of each of the faces around me; they are the living dead, she said. I was suddenly reminded of the child at Panchanandapur, who pretended to be a spirit. Here, in Manikchak, I had found the real ghosts.

We then moved to Manikchak Ghat. There, I learnt of a time when the river was free and calm. Harendra Nath Mondal remembers it as the time before the barrage was built at Farakka. Mondal, who was waiting for a steamer, said that over thirty years ago, he saw a box and a beam being floated on the river. With time came more boxes, bigger beams and pillars, and a new bridge was built to tame the river. Since then, every monsoon, the unforgiving river has broken free, mocking human beings and their technology.

Tragedies occur when man and nature conspire, and the bhangon in Malda is a fitting example of this. River erosion is a lucrative business and supports an entire industry. The following day, I was on the road again, this time to Farakka with Soumen, who worked with a local NGO. As we sped on the narrow roads, past smoke-spewing lorries, Soumen explained how the pie was shared by boulder contractors, politicians and officials. A contract for pitching boulders on the shore costs one and a half crore, but the dividends are much higher. The inferior quality of the boulders, spires and sandbags makes the river’s job easier, and subsequent orders for fresh supplies, all of inferior quality, make the contractors richer. Boulder contracts are secured through political pressure, and the barrage authorities, Soumen said, seldom ran quality checks.

Much of this was conjecture, but one cannot deny that the nature of corruption in these parts was chronic and complicated. The people in Manikchak, Kaliachak and Panchanandapur had put the blame of their misery on the Farakka barrage and the alleged irregularities in its working. I wanted to see what the person I was about to interview in Farakka had to say about the matter. B.N. Sharma, general manager, Farakka Barrage Project, was dapper and dismissive. His gleaming office, with its whiteboards, charts and maps, looked like a ship’s control room. But Sharma assured me that the barrage did not control the water-flow during the rainy season, the worst time for erosion. Hence, he dismissed suggestions that the barrage contributed to river erosion. When I mentioned the charges of corruption, he turned from suave to grave. He opened a drawer and said that he carried his resignation letter with him, and was ready to hand it in if a single charge could be proved. The real reason for erosion, he explained, was that the flood plain of an erratic river system like the Ganga had been taken over by settlers. Repeated requests to the block development officer to clear the flood plain have gone unheeded. The FBP, in the last four years, has also been involved in anti-erosion drives, plugging breaches, laying down 40-kilo boulders, erecting spires. The results have been “spectacular” (his word), and the river has been brought under control in parts of Panchanandapur and in Birnagar.

After the interview, I decided to check Sharma’s claim of “zero per cent damage” and we turned the car towards Birnagar. When we reached the village, Sharma’s words seemed to ring true at first glance. The new boulders glistened in the sun and the river gurgled past, happy and meek. Apu Sarnakar, who lives in Birnagar, said that although the currents had weakened, it was because the barrage gates — like an ominous shadow line in the distance — had not been opened this year. Had this been done, the water released from the barrage would have turned the river upon the village. The new char near Rajnagar could also have arrested the flow, sparing Birnagar this year. Contrary to Sharma’s claim, Sarnakar seemed to suggest that it was possible for the barrage to regulate the river and its fury during the rains. We took a closer look at the boulders. Few of them, I was told, weighed the required 40 kg. A strong wind rattled a signboard near the water’s edge, it bore the name of the agency doing repair work in this area. It was riddled with bullet-like holes, perhaps marks of the anger of the displaced and the dispossessed. Sarnakar turned quiet as he tried to read the bashed-up writing on the board. We stood in silence, away from the stones and spires, watching the evening gather over the waters.

A man and a child climbed the steep slope nearby. The little boy was carrying a net and I got a glimpse of silver scales in it. We walked back to Birnagar with the two of them. The boy, shy at first, began to tell me about his only trip to Calcutta. He would like to go away to the city, far from these moody waters. The old man said nothing. As he walked, his eyes kept scanning the surface of the glowing water.

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